Kids can’t do it that way. They need stability, routine, and mine need time to wake up and process the day. Luckily they can dress themselves, mostly, so we do a little planning out and finally got our morning routine more routined.

1. Pick out your clothes the night before, be ready for them. For the eldest it’s just making sure he has something, for the youngest, each piece is chose and put in a small basket with handles.

2. Set wakeup music. I’m very lazy efficient, so I burned a CD of kids music interspersed with the kids’ own voices and my voice reminding them it’s wakeup time. It’s set to go off about 30 min before breakfast every morning, to give them time to slarge down the stairs. I’m also lazy efficient enough to have bought a CD/alarm at Target that can be set only to ring M-F. Go me!

3. Have the ones who pick lunch figure out if they need a packed lunch the night before, so they can pack it themselves the night before. Now to get them to take it every day and bring the containers back …

Be that as it may, we don’t have plastered formal looks in our photos from the days of wet-plate photography, and usually a lot of blurry kids moving to and fro. But if you take enough pictures, eventually everyone is smiling and you can fix it in post-production (digitally melding all the smiling faces into one shot).

The trick is getting enough pictures. I do it with the handwashing song, converted into the cheesey song.

First, start lining up the kids. Take some shots as they are getting in place – sometimes you get a keeper. Then start everyone singing the alphabet song, substituting the word “cheese” on every rhyming beat:

A B C D E F CHEESE
H I J K L M N O CHEESE
Q R S T U CHEESE
W X Y and CHEESE
Now I know my A B CHEESE
Next time won’t you Cheese with Cheese.

I’ve had to make too many calls lately for the various buggy germs and more flying around our insides and outsides. More than not, I’ve phoned up for a non-emergency appointment and been told by the specialist’s office staff that the nearest opening for a new patient is between three and six weeks away.

Yeek.

Then something happened – I called up and asked for an after school appointment, as soon as possible for a particular doctor. Those are the most coveted, of course – no one misses school and you miss as little work as possible. He didn’t have anything, but as he shuffled his calendar, he noticed a cancellation for the next day. And if I took it, not only would I get the appointment over with, he’d knock a third off of the cash part of his usual fee. I took it.

The next appointment I needed, this time for both kids, couldn’t be scheduled on the same day (there’s a rule that I won’t complain about now). Although I couldn’t talk them around for same-date appointments two weeks out, but I booked the least-disruptive to my schedule appointments possible. That afternoon, they called me back during the witching hour, and booked the kids back-to-back for the day after.

Finally, I had one more appointment to book. Until this one came up, I’d been operating on luck. These fine ladies clued me in – if I called between 2 and 3 every day, they could move me up into a cancellation slot. Although I didn’t luck out, I now had the trick of it and put it into play for the eye doctor.

Six weeks out for a new appointment for a new patient. Ugh. Certainly the kid’s eyesight wouldn’t get any worse in the interim, but something closer would be nice. I’d called during the witching hour but before I could speak up, she remembered … a cancellation! I’d be in two days from the call instead of mid-summer. Wohooo!

How do you guys handle it? White board calendar? tack up the paper calendars from the school? “Color” in the days each needs their special items?

To answer this and other WFYW questions, follow to We are THAT Family! Many thanks for hosting this carnival!

You think with my mega food prep post last month (I know, it’s been a crazy month) I would have covered beans. Small error on my part, sorry.

I’ve been using dried and frozen and freeze dried vegetables for years – there was a metals allergy in my family so I never was much for canned veggies. And maybe it’s my inability to plan meals correctly, but the “standard sized can” of veggies isn’t quite enough for two meals, and too much for one.

But some friends have mentioned giving up on canned foods for various reasons. Expense, BPA-lining concerns, sodium content, and storage. But making your own beans means a lot of containers in the freezer in what you hope is the right amount, a lot of beans until you use them all up, or having to plan that far ahead each night.

One friend I lamented my bean-planning woes to didn’t get it. She could get home, throw food in a pot on the stove, and forget it until dinner time. By the time we used to get home, dinner would need to be ready within 45 min – which meant planning in the morning or the night before (not always possible). So I started applying my Once a Mood Cooking to beans. Here’s what I’ve worked out for me:

1. Cook beans, seasoning to taste (or a little blandly to season when used). A lot of beans! Pintos, garbanzos, white, or mixes. Set up the crock pot, let it crock all day.

2. Make dinner with some of the beans, reserving the rest.

3. Take the rest of the beans and put them on a cooky sheet that has a raised lip or in a casserole dish, one layer, spaced a little apart.

4. Throw the dish the freezer for 15 or 20 minutes until the beans are mostly frozen.

5. Scrape the beans into a bag or container, put in the freezer; repeat step 3 until all beans are done.

6. Optionally, take the bean juice left and freeze it in ice cube trays. Mix in with the bagged frozen beans, or in a separate container for use as flavoring and liquid.

Now you can pour out your beans into a quick meal as needed – lunch for one or dinner for eight, just like the storebought veggies!

One time we got smart – jelly on white, peanut butter on wheat. Two days later even smarter – different shapes! Pictured are cheese (triangle), jelly (square) and peanut butter (rectangle). We’re still repeating ourselves, but not quite as much …

Ah, shoes and socks and bits and bobs, it’s time to get ready for school again. Yesterday I pulled out the school clothes tub to sort through what we’ve got an what we need. Pulled three shirts I’m going to try and de-stain, added three I picked up from an outlet store last week. Pants and shorts we’re good on, but I’ll need to take my eldest shoe shopping.

The day before school starts, we’ll pick up his classroom assignment, teacher assignment, and supply sheet. The supplies usually range from typical, such as paper, pencils, and crayons, to class-wide, such as construction paper, hand sanitizer, and modeling clay.

Some of these things can be acquired sustainability – sure I can go buy a pack of Play-Doh, but I’ve been saving it up from kid meals and party bags. Even getting it out for the kids to play with from time to time, I have a fat ton of that stuff in the house. Paper? Notebooks? Pencils? Recycle-content goods! Even plastic bags have gotten into the act, made with less plastic (and at a higher price, go green gouging!).

And what am I sending the supplies in this year? A reusable bag. The price on decent totes are up and down – a dollar for a basic one, more for canvas, and a middle ground at some places for recyclable heavy-duty plastic bags. I picked up an adorable one with “apples for the teacher” at Target – just the right size to slip those classroom supplies into.

I’ll be doing this all year, like last year, sending in supplies when I find a deal on something useful, need to declutter stuff we end up acquiring – sending books to share to school or after care, donating kid-meal toys (unopened) to various “treasure boxes”, or other class treats. And I’ll encourage general recycling as well – I’ll speak to the teacher about having a broken crayon collection box in their room so we can use the power of many fingers to recycle them as a project or send them off for re-use by someone else.

Sorry, boring and quick this week, but one I figured out by accident – folding the napkins in the dryer.

I usually just toss our cloth napkins in with any old load of laundry. This leads to a pile of randomness going from the panlaundrium to the sofa, and napkins getting lost along the way.

What I figured out yesterday, however, is that I can tilt the dryer tumbler to have a flat surface – and put folded napkins atop that surface. They are up and out of the way while I hang (sometimes) the other clothes up or roll the clothes (more likely) into a waiting panlaundrium basket.

Then, before I re-load the dryer, I tuck the folded napkins into my pocket, or make a trip to the little baskets I keep around for holding the napkins until meal time.

Apple. Tree. You know the old saw.

I meant to blog about garden plot markers months ago. A number of websites suggest old vertical blind slats be used to tell our turnips from our carrots in the early planting stages, save used popsicle sticks, and suggested uses for other reusable items. I made a mental note to try and talk my SIL out of her old blinds to follow that advice, until the new coffee machines showed up at the office.

One of the first things I did was to take it apart and see how it worked.
After some trial and error, I finally figured out how to stock it, and worked to free the plastic sliders the coffee packs ship on. Three or four of the sliders sat my desk for a week or so until I finally took them home to sit on my desk there. Then one morning, as I racked off six more flavors of coffee, it struck me – white, plastic – I can use them in the garden.

A little over a foot in height, these strips can be used as name stakes, border markers, and plant trainers. Perhaps, if modified, they can be used to lift pots and provide drainage channels under and in those pots.

And marked as number five plastic, they’re recyclable when I’m done or if it doesn’t work.

I called my mom not long after to chat about gardening, life, the universe, everything, and towards the end of the conversation I mentioned that my office had started using this fancy coffee system. I went on about the possible uses of the racks and how I accumulated them before finding a good reuse for the plastic strips – and it turned out she had a half dozen or so on her desk as well, waiting for a reuse to strike her — and was happy to save them for me.

Pack rat, or innovative, creative thinker?

They state they won’t delete the files they convert to Vimeo content for free users, but they can’t hold the “big” original files any more. It makes sense, but … that’s really short notice.

So, download it to have it, choose to upgrade your account, or just panic. And stop counting on “free” services as your only back up, if you have. :-) Good luck!

[TL;DR version - big files go in, little files are made. Big files will start to go away - back them up now and/or upgrade your account.]

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